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About

Maik Poggendorf is a robotics researcher whose work centers on safe human-robot collaboration, force-controlled manipulation, and bio-inspired robotic design. His most impactful contribution is a projection-based safety system for physical human-robot interaction, which uses conventional projector and camera equipment to create dynamic, arbitrarily shaped light barriers around a robot’s workspace. This approach, detailed in his 2011 paper (41 citations), enhances both safety and transparency in collaborative environments, enabling robots to work alongside humans without physical cages. Poggendorf also developed a performance indicator for benchmarking force-controlled robots (2018, 13 citations), addressing the challenge of sensitive assembly tasks where robots must interact with unknown environments using only force feedback. Additionally, he designed an elephant’s trunk-inspired hyper-redundant robotic arm (2012, 13 citations), a mechatronic solution for safe human-robot interaction that leverages its flexible, continuous structure to move safely in shared spaces. With over 80 total citations, Poggendorf’s work bridges practical safety systems, performance evaluation, and bio-inspired design, offering foundational tools for advancing collaborative robotics in industrial and service applications.